Just two days after Christmas, Ruby Hero Luis Lavena updated RubyInstaller. This update now supports both Ruby 1.9.2-p136 and Ruby 1.8.7-p330. And again, RubyInstaller is a great way to install and run Ruby on a Windows machine.

Hackety Hack 1.0 was released on Christmas day. Hackety Hack is now supported by a new team - after _why's disappearance - and it's a great way to introduce someone either to Ruby or to programming in general.

Rubinius brought Christimas a few days early, with a 1.2.0 release earlier this month. This release doesn't contain many new features, but does carry performance improvements, bug fixes, and multilingual documentation.

Rails ships with a distance_of_time_in_words helper, but it's not incredibly accurate. That's where Ryan Bigg's new gem comes in. It rewrites the helper to give you more accurate word measurements. So, now we'll know exactly how much time is left in this episode.

The Date and DateTime strftime is unintuitive and almost guarantees you a trip to your Ruby documentation. Not. Any. Longer. Mike Buckbee has just released a new website at www.foragoodstrftime.com, which provides you with a quick and easy lookup point.

Adam Sanderson has been writing up some interesting blog posts detailing many parts of the Ruby Standard Library that most people don't even know exist - let alone are familiar with. He's covered things like MiniTest, ShellWords, TSort, and Abbrev, and has even released the Qwandry gem for quickly accessing Ruby documentation.

Last Summer Lakshan Perera worked on OpenNebula's Administration tool for his Google Summer of Code project. And, last week, he wrote up details on how he built its admin tool using a series of mini-Sinatra apps bound together with Rack::Mount. It's an interesting read to see what someone else has done (and what's possible) with Rack.

Richard Huang's Rails Best Practices gem has just been updated to version 0.6. It's received a lot of improvements and the website is full of great snippets and code examples demonstrating how to clean up your Rails application.